The week before Review II was productive, but rushed. We were able to rehearse our presentation, and spent more time gaining full understanding of our team's concepts. Some team members were absent from some VCs, we had some scrambling for decisions before the presentation, and were not able to get synthesis of all of the team's ideas into the document.
Sunday
We met to digest our coaches' and peers' comments and discuss how to move forward. We had a good VC in which we discussed the core spaces of our program: the spaces for researchers and the spaces for visitors, and the spaces where everyone merges. We discussed the layout of the research space, and asked questions like: "Will they rent the offices?" and "Could it be like a membership?". The greatest product of this meeting was the necessity of a wishlist, where we could all communicate our thoughts on the program. Heinrich directed us all to submit our ideas to the Dropbox, and he would compile them into an Excel file. Rodrigo aided us by reminding us to remember to concern ourselves with spaces that are of the greatest benefit to our stakeholders.
Tuesday
Our goal for Tuesday's VC was to make fundamental decisions about the placement and orientation of our buildings. We had chosen this diffusion of smaller building volumes for a few reasons: a) seismic safety b) diffusion and porosity and c) integration of the built environment with the natural landscape.
Technical difficulties prevented us from having a productive meeting. For the first 30-45 minutes, a team member's connection was choppy and he was on and off the VC, able to hear us, but unable to be heard. Therefore, we could not gain an understanding of his model for the site. One of our coaches, Andy, was present and helped to moderate the meeting. The meeting became less of a discussion and more of an argument, and emotions were running high. The team member left the Hangout, and Andy directed us to try and come up with a visual representation of our journey so far.
The team agreed that we couldn't make any decisions that day. We had two diverging concepts for the site and needed to hear everyone's thoughts before we could move on. We concluded that we would reconvene the next day to hear all of the architects' concepts, and discuss what ideas we liked the most.
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| How we felt after the VC... |
Wednesday
We reconvened Wednesday night. This meeting was able to bring us to a better place for a few reasons: 1) Gretchen was able to talk to her local coach, John, and he was able to attend part of the meeting, 2) Rodrigo was able to attend and offer advice as well, and 3) we had less technical issues. By the end of the meeting, both Joris and Morgane were able to present their ideas, explain them, have a q&a session, and receive feedback from the coaches. We were even able to make a few decisions!
After the arguments of Tuesday, Joris listened to Andy's advice and drew a storyboard of our journey as a team over the past weeks. It was a peace offering, and the team felt unified after discussing it. See Joris' story: here.
Joris, Morgane, and Tibo's work is presented below:
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| Joris' concept for the transit center |
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| Joris' plan for the site |
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| Plan view of building area |
Morgane's explanation + references for her concept: here
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| Morgane's plan for the site |
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John and Rodrigo offered their insights, asking us to consider this wishlist heavily, thinking about how we want our linear park to relate to the volumes of the research park, how people will travel across this space, and how we want to connect these differently functioning spaces.
Before we ended the meeting, we voted on the placement of the bus terminal (aboveground) and whether we wanted a diffuse or dense campus of buildings (a combination of both).
Thursday
Today's agenda was also optimistic, but the product of this meeting was very valuable nonetheless. Salvador presented more detailed sustainable design strategies, and Joris elaborated on his plan for the transit center.
Salvador's sustainability presentation: here
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| Salvador's concept for the building/bridge crossings |
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| Joris' vision for the transit center |
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| Section views of the transit center |
We discussed the topography of the site, using these slopes/benches/volumes as both building and bridge and as a way to integrate the linear park with the research park campus. The discussion became stagnant as we realized that we had not completed Heinrich's wishlist, so we could not decide what spaces needed to be placed, and where.
Some Bedouin Thoughts:
"We found peace with our metaphor (symbiotic succession), and we are finding good ways to connect to it with our concept. We have found a productive way to make decisions, and we survived another forest fire. We were able to get some coach feedback, came to an innovative concept (interactive museum), and were able to use the landscape to interact with the architecture to realize our concept of symbiotic succession." - Carina
"I think we have achieved great symbiotic succession after all these fires! I feel that, in a way, we were about to lose the interdisciplinary essence with so many individual proposals, but now that we talked about integrating them, and everyone is participating, I think we're back on track!" - Salvador
"I think we hit another rough patch, but our desire to keep our team unified helped us circle back into another iteration of the design process and come to a better understanding of each other's visions. I think our next proposal will be very powerful and have a much deeper connection to our metaphor and better reflect our team process." - Gretchen
Tomorrow...
So, Gretchen converted Heinrich's Excel wishlist sheets to a Google spreadsheet, and the team has been tasked with voting on their desired spaces/functions, and Heinrich will compile and analyze our concepts.
As a team, we feel much better because we are moving forward by both making our opinions heard and making decisions.
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